Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Apple Adds RCS and OpenAI Explodes!

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

This week, Marques and David discuss the big news of the week including Apple agreeing to add RCS to its Messages app. After that David walks us through everything that happened with OpenAI before Marques talks about what it was like to go to his first F1 race. Of course, we wrap it all up with trivia! Hope you enjoy. P.S - Shoutout to 9to5Mac for breaking the RCS story and the Verge for their amazing coverage and reporting on the OpenAI situation. We've linked them down below! Links: Apple Adds RCS: https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/ OpenAI stories: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/22/23967223/sam-altman-returns-ceo-open-ai https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/17/23965982/openai-ceo-sam-altman-fired https://www.theverge.com/23966325/openai-sam-altman-fired-turmoil-chatgpt Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Instagram/Threads/Twitter: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Book with your local travel advisor or at Alright, what up? What's up? Welcome back to WaveFlo. Yep. It's a pretty breezy week, right? Pretty light week, honestly. It's Thanksgiving week. People are at home with their families. Sort of holiday type stuff. We kind of slowed down a little bit. one yep it's a pretty breezy week right pretty light week honestly it's thanksgiving week people are at home with their families sort of holiday type stuff we kind of slow down a little bit

yeah things wind down people people stop releasing major news that could um i don't know like news that could like change the fate of um humanity oh my god apple is out of rcs nothing chats has been deleted sunburn is gone sam alt Altman is fired from OpenAI. He's a CEO of Microsoft now? Or maybe he's not. SpaceOct 6 rocket exploded. Dua Lipa interviewed Tim Cook. And there's a 400 mile pole star.

Oh my. Oh, guys, this is a pro. Oh, okay. I think we aged about 75 years in the last four days. I just want to say, this week has been... Thank you guys for making that dramatic entrance so much worth it. We planned it out and everything. It was great. I feel like this week has been the most insane week in technology for like five years at least.

Really? That's how I feel, personally. In technology? Just in technology news. It's definitely a lot of things happening at once, all of which are very dramatic. Yes. And a lot of things that we never thought would ever happen. Interesting.

Well, where do we start? There's a couple things that I literally would have put money on never happening that we could start with. Maybe the nothing Sunbird RCS thing is the best thing. Right. That's a whole experience in itself. Okay. Let's start with that

okay so we could go rewind a little bit to literally last week's episode when we were talking about the video that we made about nothing trying this weird thing being this quirky weird company uh making an app that would bring iMessage to their newest phone yeah the nothing phone too and the challenges that they would have with that and obviously the reasons why they were going to try this crazy thing, ultimately what they were doing was branding or skinning an existing app called Sunbird, which was in beta and wasn't really publicly available.

So they're bringing it to the public. But ultimately having a number of security concerns, as I mentioned in the video, like you probably don't ever want to type your Apple credentials into a third party service ever. Yeah. Probably. Yeah.

Right. But you know, it was an option. So I just was something that people should be aware of being available to them. No more than, I don't know, five days after that video it probably like three days even before yeah it was it was very quick yeah very quickly it gets all the attention in the world and everyone's security concerns are rightfully brought to the forefront immediately like almost over the top of all the top of wow i message for android huh that's interesting like nobody was talking about that anymore it was immediately, this is kind of a hack.

You should probably never use it. By the way, I didn't log in with my own credentials. I logged in with the studio account. So that one may be, uh, maybe not the best situation, but either way, uh,

immediately gets talked a lot about security. Right. Um, how many days later was it that sunbird, uh, there are nothing chats was removed from the Play Store over these security concerns? Yeah, pretty much immediately security researchers started ripping it apart. Most notably from one of their competitors called Text.com.

They have a Text.com, which is owned by Automatic, which also owns WordPress and Tumblr. They had a bunch of security researchers just rip it apart and they found a lot of really big problems um that sunbird was very shady about was hiding a lot of stuff about um things like they were using http instead of https which is like difficult to do nowadays oh how do you even get wow they were storing all the media and text in like plain text in a firebase database um yeah so so it's it was really bad uh i kind of picture like the nothing team and carl watching this unfold like oh yeah it could have totally gone we could have seen this coming a mile away like this is not a great uh a great look i feel like nothing really should have done their due diligence here and like had their own security team because especially because nothing put their name on it in their video they said

we made an iMessage on android app which they didn't they yeah and they helped bring one to market yeah basically yeah uh so that happened yeah they pulled it immediately from the play store um and then as an update sunbird just today tuesday day of recording sunbird also suspended their operations indefinitely until they can figure out a solution uh i'm not sure that's ever going to happen because i feel like their name is pretty tainted at this point yeah so we went from nothing launching a big collab with sunbird that would be available to everybody soon to it being removed from the play store to sunbird no longer existing as a company sort of like they're still there they still exist and they're just they're just like

seizing all operations indefinitely cool cool and i just want to point out the timeline here right so like we put out the nothing chats video on the 14th when they announced it uh by the 17th that's when they got shut down the nothing chats thing got shut down but on the 16th the evening of november the 16th on thursday yeah i'm sitting i'm a little i'm just typing on my little computer. This is one of those do you remember where you were moments. Yes, it really is.

I was typing at a bar. I was just like typing words and I just see, somebody posted in Slack this thing about RCS coming to the iPhone. The day before, Nothing Chats was supposed

to come out, by the way. Yep. Wow. Yeah, I remember where I was too where were you so i was on a we were on the plane to las vegas for the f1 race which we'll get to later and i had just gotten my room key and headed up to my room i had just unpacked and like took my stuff out my bag put it down and opened my laptop and logged into the wi-fi and that's the first thing i saw wow like oh dang so what we saw was the headlines or commentary about the news that the iphone will be getting rcs support after all next week in 2024 yeah now whoa we've been talking forever about the green bubble versus blue bubble thing

and i want to be very clear that's not going away yeah that's definitely not going away but what google has been pushing so hard and what a lot of people have been asking for is like today when an android phone and an iphone message each other it is a horrible experience on purpose apple has been just running it back through sms and mms if i send you a picture it compresses it down to i don't know how many 190 bytes whatever it is it looks like trash yeah videos get compressed to look like they were from the 1800s yeah and little like little rectangular box it's horrible it's all unencrypted like it's a disaster so yeah we wanted better support support between Android phones and iPhones. So, Android phones, all new phones, basically, supporting RCS.

The iPhone gaining RCS support in 2024 means that, one, green bubbles will stay green, but they will now be RCS messages instead of SMS and MMS. Which ideally, and correct me if I'm messing up some of these, but I think that means we're going to get read receipts. We're going to get typing indicators. Yep. We're going to get possibly reaction support. Yep. And ideally higher quality media, so high resolution photos, high resolution videos, and i think sending them over the internet

yes yeah so all of that is line replies yeah inline replies threads all that is much much better it still isn't iMessage it's alongside iMessage on the iphone right but the last bit of it was it's still unencrypted yeah and from what i understand this is because the the rcs universal profile that apple is pledging to support it doesn't have rcs built in or sorry it doesn't have encryption built in yeah yeah add-on yes it's it's very weird the universal profile that was built by the gsma has all of those things like typing indicators and red receipts and all the stuff yep but there's no encryption built in and my assumption for that would be the fact... I believe there is encryption.

It's encrypted in transit. It's just not end-to-end encrypted. Oh. Okay. I've been trying so hard to figure out what that means. I can't. Yeah. But in the universal profile?

In the universal profile, it is. I don't know what it means. All the sources I read say encrypted in transit, but not end-to-end encrypted. Interesting. Please tweet at me and explain what that means. Okay, well. Good luck in a tweet. For some reason, it was on the universal profile.

I have an inkling that a lot of countries, specifically the EU, is very against encryption in general. And they've been fighting against encryption for a long time they've been trying to get people uh companies like whatsapp and all these other manufacturers to not have encryption in their apps because they want to be able to oh like peek in the back door in the back door yeah and so there's sort of been this weird power struggle between like meta and the eu for a long period of time. The GSMA obviously covers a lot of the European Union. So like it's possible that when they were building the universal profile, they didn't build it in and just said in your given country or for your given device, you could do whatever you want.

But we don't want to build it into the universal profile. I'm not sure. That's just the theory. But currently, Android phones that are using Google Messages use Google's proprietary end-to-end encryption standard. Which builds in end-to-end encryption. Right, which is why it took so long for Google Messages to add group messages that had end-to-end encryption

because they had to update their proprietary stuff. Got it. So Apple doesn't want to use their stuff. They don't want to use Google's thing. So they're going to use the universal profile. I've heard that there's hopes that maybe they will be able to add on to the universal profile or maybe support encryption down the road. It would be nice. I don't think it's the top

of everyone's priority list, but I do think it's still pretty important considering Mms and sms to this day yeah really unencrypted so that would be nice yeah but yeah just one of those things we never thought would happen yeah just sort of an out of the blue press release not really too much of a statement from any of the notable apple people yeah tim cook said anything about it no no no no he's too busy getting interviewed a lot of people are like nothing made apple make this move and no it's not that because the day thursday that they that they announced it was actually the um it was the last day that apple had to make their case to the

european to the eu that they were not a core platform service for iMessage. So the EU, they issued a bunch of gatekeepers. They said, these companies are gatekeepers with these apps in these types of platforms. So they had messaging platforms, they had social media, they had all this. So TikTok was on there, Google was on there for various things. And iMessage got listed as a potential gatekeeper

that over a long period of time they were going to issue an investigation into to determine whether or not they were gatekeepers and apple had until thursday to make their case to the eu why they weren't gatekeepers and so on the evening of the final day the dawn of the final day yeah they go we support rcs yeah of course we're not gatekeepers we're about to anyway universal profile yeah yeah what do you think ships first rcs on the iphone or vision pro vision pro because vision pro is slated for potentially march like spring yeah and rcs on the iphone i would guess is i 18. So maybe not till the next iPhone comes out. Yeah.

Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Where were you? Where were you? Where were you when the news went down? Yeah. That's definitely the biggest news of the week. Yeah. It was a big deal. No. Yeah. That was really interesting to me.

I want to discuss real quick. Do you think that the green bubble, blue bubble thing is going gonna still be a problem that's like a conversation that people are having around this right now right like is it still going to be this like oh you don't have an iphone you're a blue bubble yes you think so oh yeah apple will find many ways to make that persist because they know how strong that is and like there's still gonna be a lot of features that imessage does not support you know with adding into. Like if you text an Android phone, you still can't probably do lots of things like add them into a group chat or whatever else.

Apple iMessage, you can't start a FaceTime from inside of it. There's lots of things like the games inside of iMessage that people play. All these things that they'll continue to add on. I think they're going to continue to add specific iMessage-only features that aren't supported by RCS. Yeah. They have the whole iMessage store thing that you can download sticker packs and do all that stuff. Apple Pay people in there and send your stickers and emojis and whatever. I remember watching WWDC, I think it was, and just thinking the entire time, every single feature that they're announcing inside of messages is not

supported when you're texting an Android phone. It must be an iPhone. Like the dragging of the stickers around the chats and the starting a FaceTime from inside of it, everything, the link sharing, link previews, it was all just if you text your friend with an iPhone. Yeah. I do wonder if they're going to let you do group chats with iPhones and Android phones, and it'll just make the group chat be green, but it'll still be RCS. So if it's RCS,

then the experience isn't getting downgraded that much. Hopefully. So people wouldn't be that mad. I don't know. Hopefully. It's all a big unanswered question, but the fact that they announced they're doing it at all is like a major thing. I did see a report that iOS 18 is apparently going to be like one of the biggest iOS updates they've done in recent years because the iPhone 16 is not going to be that different from the 15.

That's really funny. So to sell more iPhones, they have to make the next iOS update feel big. Which is funny because you're old iPhones are just going to get the software update and they'll be fine. Yeah. That's funny. I'm interested in that though. I'm curious what they just going to get the software update and it'll be fine. Yeah. That's funny. I'm interested in that, though. I'm curious what they're going to be able to add.

Maybe like checking off a box inside a widget. That would be super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's Nothing Chats, RCS on iPhone, and Sunbird all in one week. So that's your quick breeze through of maybe

one of the biggest news stories of the past year yeah just one of many we have here on this episode of waveform yeah uh we're gonna we'll take a quick break because we've got plenty more to talk about but of course as we do our quick break we should we should do some trivia trivia okay so the next segment we're about to get into after the break that's marquez we're hitting the microphone is all about sam altman oh boy at open ai that's gonna be a doozy but before we get there one year before open ai was launched in 2015, David just told me, for a total of eight days, Sam Altman was the CEO of what popular social media company? I don't like that. I don't like that sparkle in your eyes.

Sam Altman was the CEO of what popular social media company? For eight days. It's currently popular? Yep. Wow. Sam Altman was the CEO for eight days of a popular social media company. There's not that many popular social media companies. Yeah, true.

It's probably X back in 2016. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to think on that. All right. We'll be right back. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving.

For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. I am so dreading groceries this week.

Why? You can skip it. Oh, what? Just like that? Just like that. How about dinner with my third cousin? Skip it. Prince Fluffy's favorite treats? Skippable. Midnight snacks?

Skip. My neighbor's nightly saxophone practices? Uh, nope. You're on your own there. Could've skipped it. should have skipped it. Skip to the good part and get groceries, meals, and more delivered right to your door on Skip. Welcome back, everybody. As you may have heard before, and okay, I just want to, I just want to like take this quick note to say you're, you're watching slash listening to this probably on Friday. We are currently recording this on Tuesday. That's a big deal.

A lot of stuff probably happened. So I really am sorry if we're out of date with this. We are trying our best. A lot happened since Friday. Yeah, so we're going to talk OpenAI, Microsoft, et cetera. We're going to try to go blow for blow timeline up until now, the moment of recording. Right. Acknowledging that some stuff's probably going to happen after we record

before this video goes up, and that's fine. At least you'll be up to speed on it. Maybe they'll take a Thanksgiving break and nothing will happen. No chance. No way. That'd be nice. Okay. One of the wildest, most, I guess wildest meaning like most unexpected stories, kind of out of nowhere with no

seeming explanation yeah still no explanation as of recording 4 p.m eastern time on tuesday so it's a weird one because i can't begin with so how did it start because there's you kind of can because i actually went back to 2015 for this timeline oh okay, okay. Let's start there. What happened? All right. Uh, a lot of you potentially have heard of open AI probably by now. You probably already know we made a video about Dolly, which they make, which was a text to image generator that kind of like got everyone excited. But then chat GPT came out in all of this is less than two years, less than one year for chat. Chat GPT came out one year ago, November 2022. Yeah.

Insane. So ChatGPT came out in 2022. And that kind of blew the lid off of this whole, like, AI revolution. Just everyone talking about AI every single week, advancements being made, everything. Transformers, what ChatGPT is based on, have been around since 2017. But OpenAI was the first company that kind of, of like took the lid off of what they could do and really showed people what these models were like to play with. So since 2017, I'm just setting the stage, by the way. seen microsoft invested a 49 stake in open ai which right which gave it the ability to um have

a lot of cloud credits with microsoft azure because they need these uh server farms to run their models on right to me it felt like we're too big and they're too big to straight up acquire open ai possibly regulations would not let that go, but we're going to act a lot like we would have if we did acquire open AI, meaning they're very close partners. Yeah. They work together on new products, new announcements, new features. They give each other exclusive access to things. Yeah.

Microsoft and open AI are like pretty. They're like, they're very tightly bonded. There's actually an org chart, um, on the open AI website and and it shows Microsoft as a minority investor in the org chart. Sure. Yeah. So they invested for a 49% stake, which was effectively just like a $10 to $11 billion investment, mostly in Azure cloud credits, which means they didn't give them cash. And when you say that they kind of get to own OpenAI in a sort of, they get to do that without actually giving them cash and when you say that they like kind of get to own open ai and s it sort of they get to do that without actually giving them cash imagine like walking into a best buy and

if they gave you enough gift cards you would just own the best buy that was a horrible analogy i mean it's not that different but think about that yeah think about that yeah it's not that different didn't really give you anything yeah by the way i, it's not that different. But think about that. Yeah. Think about that. Yeah, it's not that different. It didn't really give you anything. Yeah. By the way, I think it's Azure. Yes. Yes, Azure. Microsoft Azure.

Azure. Azure. Yes. Okay. So you can see that Microsoft has definitely taken advantage of this partnership over the last year, right? They released Bing Chat. Yep.

They released... We've made so many videos around why Microsoft has so much to gain, so little to lose versus Google. They really kept this investment pretty quiet until ChatGPT came out, and then they took the lid off of it. Now, on Friday, last Friday, opening eyes board very abruptly fired

the CEO, Sam Altman. And the saga that unfolded since then, or that has unfolded and is still currently as of recording unfolding is probably the most fast-paced most in the open happening on twitter happening on threads live i am glued to my phone i can't stop refreshing my computer drama that we've seen in a very long time is it happening on threads too a little bit on threads i've seen so much on twitter yeah the problem with threads is they don't really have an algorithmic feed yeah so you can't see i'm getting stuff that happened two days ago and it's just i would have to get lucky for it to pop up on my feed but

twitter is just just sitting in the trending topics yeah yeah popping up on my for you page yeah exactly i was keeping up with everything on threads really personally yeah oh just because everyone i was following was talking about it yeah so it wasn't like a recommended thing yeah okay so before we get into the timeline uh from friday i want to give a little context about open ai the organization so open ai was founded in 2015 as a non-profit um you can kind of think of them like a research organization they were basically like we want to create an artificial general intelligence that benefits all humanity and effectively what they would categorize an artificial general intelligence as is a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most

economically valuable work where they started and this came from a book i've been reading but sort of as a proxy to the corporate ai things that were being built, like OpenAI more or less was supposed to exist to provide some structure to what AI hopefully could turn into and not go off the rails if it was just controlled by corporations. Yeah, that was the big thing is that they made it a nonprofit specifically because they didn't want their research and work to be profit driven, which always errs towards acceleration. Yeah. Right. We have to be in front of the other people. We have to be better than the other people. So if you're a nonprofit, you don't really have to chase that stuff.

And originally when they got founded, they were trying to get $1 billion worth of investments so that they could use that money to run the company and also hire engineers, do all that stuff. Just a billion? Yeah, just a billion. And they got a bunch of people to invest. Sam Allman invested a bunch of money. He was one of the co-founders. They got Elon Musk to invest a bunch of money. He was also sitting on the board, I believe.

of money. He was also sitting on the board, I believe. And unfortunately, they were only able to raise about $130.5 million of investment. Can't do anything with that. Yeah, I mean... Can't run a company with that. Yeah, it worked for a little bit, but it doesn't really last in the long run, right? So in 2019, they kind of realized like, oh, God, like we need to figure out how to make money to run this company, especially because once the transformer was invented in 2017, they started taking advantage of it. All of a sudden you have to train models that run servers and they were making things like GPT-2 and they had this. It was called the Open AI 5. This is actually how I heard about it back in, I think, like 2016, 2017. OpenAI 5, this is actually how I heard about it back in, I think, like 2016, 2017.

It was a Dota 2 bot, which is the only video game that I play, that they trained with unsupervised learning, which is just like throwing the game in a sandbox and letting the AI learn how to play it with team coordination. And they trained it to compete against the best players of Dota 2 in the world. And it won a bunch of times until they figured out how to beat them. Yeah. So obviously they had these little milestones that were really making it work. But then in 2019, they were like, okay, we're running out of money. We actually need to make more money.

So what they did was they added a new company underneath the nonprofit company. So they had the nonprofit, OpenAI. Then they had a holding company underneath the nonprofit. And the holdings company was owned by the engineers and employees and the shareholders. And then that holdings company owned the for-profit company. That's okay. Yeah.

I hate it. Yeah. But okay. There's a decent amount of uh businesses that are like this that are trying to be more like good for the planet the whole idea is that the non-profit still gets to make all the decisions and the non-profit is generally made up of people who are not as involved with the day-to-day operations of the for-profit business i see yeah there's still a sort of a wacky weirdness about a non-profit owning a for-profit company.

Yeah. But, you know, I get weird. Yeah. Didn't Patagonia do something like this? Probably something similar. It was some sort of corporate restructuring. They donated profits to a new not-for-profit that was owned by the person who owned Patagonia. Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. So this new nonprofit company was also a capped, the new for-profit company was also a capped for-profit company. So they could only make a certain amount of money per year that was used to pay engineers to run the servers. And all the extra money got fed back to the nonprofit, which was used for research, all of the stuff that the nonprofit did.

Sure. Right. Okay. Okay, cool. So we got that out of the way. That's very, this is, that's going to be very important to the story. Okay. Okay.

Um, now that restructuring that they did to create the for-profit capped profit company also came with a 49% minority investment from Microsoft, um, into the for-profit arm of the company, right? So because they needed specifically a cash injection, secondarily, they needed servers like Microsoft Azure. So Microsoft decided to hold a 49% stake in the company, which was effectively a $10 billion credit for Azure. Now, specifically, the board of the nonprofit company made sure that Microsoft was not able to have any leverage over what the company was doing. Specifically, the nonprofit arm of the company, if you go on their website and look at their structure, it says Microsoft intentionally does not hold a board seat microsoft does not is not

able to control what the for-profit company company does all of this stuff they look we don't own them i swear we don't own them yeah yeah yeah yeah the non-profit was like we're going to continue on our mission and we need to make sure that microsoft a for-profit company does not like alter our mission in a bunch of ways. But then you guys probably saw Bing chat launched, which spurred this entire AI race with Bard and Google search generative experiences. But Microsoft's been adding GPT capabilities to literally everything. Oh yeah.

We got co-pilot, we got Bing chat, we got Microsoft 365, got all these AI integrations. So yeah, like you said, it's like, we don't own them, but we're kind of... Yeah. We're not exclusive, but it's going pretty good. Yeah. They're able to leverage and control a lot of the for-profit wing.

Yeah. Anyway, this all really took off since last november when chat gpt got released um but since then they have moved to a paid model gpt plus which gives people access to gpt4 which is their latest model then dolly 3 came which was like the newest version of their text-to-image generator all this stuff um and people started building on top of gpt4 and the entirety of silicon valley suddenly had a bunch of ai startups which were really just gpt4 rappers yeah which really felt very confusing to me it did it also kind of felt like a gold rush in a way where it felt like every startup i'd seen had some like my inbox you should see it

it was just ai this ai that the what was their like for a while it became very popular to just say yeah so my company's like the uber of yeah blank exactly and that was a couple years and then it's now the chat gpt we are the chat gpt of blank or we are the chatbot of or the ai of blank yeah yeah it's everywhere and everyone was just launching chatbots and for some reason saying it was going to change the universe which i don't really agree with chatbot fridge yeah but that all led up to this open ai dev day that we actually talked about on last week's episode that happened two weeks ago where they announced gpts which was your own personal like specifically tailored chat gpt that they were going to have a store for you could sell them you could buy them very um how do you

make a company at a corporation style thing happening right i like the idea which for a for a non-profit organization to be kind of like selling these GPTs felt weird. It's a little weird, but that was a way that they were like, we got to make money out of this. And, uh, since then, since 2019,

the valuation of open AI has gone from like $20 billion up to about 90 billion, just to give you context. Uh, that's what they're valued at right now or what they were valued at on Thursday. Um, okay. And that all brings us to this last Friday. Now we should probably introduce you to the board of the organization because they're

going to be very central to the story. So first we've got the CEO, Sam Altman, which we talked about before. So you're not reading the script, are you? No. I was just Googling it, OpenAI's valuation. Don't read the script because that's the answer to the trivia question. Okay. He developed a social networking app called Looped when he was 19 in 2015,

and then he was a partner at Y Combinator, which is the biggest tech startup incubator in the world, and then eventually he helped found OpenAI when it launched in 2015. Then we've got another co-founder. We've got Greg Brockman, who was Stripe's CTO in 2013. And he left them in 2015 to fund and become the CTO of OpenAI. And he led a lot of those early projects that they did. Then you've got the chief scientist, Ilya Setskover,

who, by the way, is the protege of Jeffrey Hinton, who was the guy that invented the neural network, recently left Google to go talk about why he thinks AI is going to destroy the world. So that was fun. Nice. Okay. So those are the board members.

We're going to talk about them again in a bit. On Thursday night, ilia texts sam asking to schedule a google meet call for friday at noon note that sam was representing open ai at a conference on thursday you know they're owned by microsoft and not using skype just wanted to like not teams just yeah just wanted to like throw all that in there real quick it's people are making this joke and they're saying it's hilarious. However, the call was coming from the nonprofit arm of OpenAI and the nonprofit does not have an investment by Microsoft. Excellent point, David.

Thank you. So they use the better one. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, people are making all these jokes on Twitter like, please just never answer a Google meet call ever again. But he takes this Google meet call and they basically like fire him out of nowhere.

Specifically Ilya, who was the, um, the other co-founder. And they didn't really tell anyone why they fired him. They just said that Sam was not consistently candid in his conversations with the board, which is really vague, like very vague. Yeah. And everyone just starts wildly speculating as to what the heck happened, right?

Including us in the Slack. Including us in the Slack. Yeah. Immediately after Sam's call, Greg Brockman, who was also on the board and the other co-founder that was not Ilya, got a Google Meet call as well. Answered it. Probably shouldn't have answered it after the first one happened. He didn't get fired, but he got removed from his board seat and they demoted him in the company but said he was going to stay in the company. And like they called him as they issued a press release saying he was staying at the company he immediately tweets out no i'm i'm not staying at this company if you're just gonna

randomly do this to me so he's like i don't know what you guys are doing but i'm leaving with sam no matter what happens and he tweets out this thing that's literally like we're still trying to figure out what happened yeah so very very abrupt this beginning of the chain of events yeah not really sure what triggered it or what sparked it it's like yeah yeah that's kind of unknown but it is very quickly starting to send some dominoes scattering yeah yeah yeah yeah and the entire the entirety of the tech space is just like what what is happening, right? Yeah. It's on Twitter already. And then Ilya called for an all-hands meeting Friday afternoon where he defended the ousting and said that it was necessary to protect OpenAI's mission of making AI beneficial to humanity.

So. It's kind of vague. Yeah. It's kind of vague. Yeah, those breadcrumbs lead you to believe, like, okay, I assume that the rest of the board thought that maybe Sam and Greg were doing things that were more commercially driven, right? Yeah. If they wanted to focus specifically on making sure that AI was only being developed for all of humanity and wasn't being, like, affected by corporations, then maybe he thought that they thought the rest of the board thought that sam was being like manipulated by satya and microsoft or being like overly leveraged by them that's one theory there are many theories going around yep um microsoft

obviously not very happy about this because they have a 49 stake in the for-profit company. And they also allegedly did not know anything about Sam getting fired until the press release went out. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. When that happened, if you Googled Microsoft stock, it was just a straight line down. It just went boom. But correct me if I'm wrong, David. The OpenAI board does not hold a fiduciary responsibility

to microsoft correct sam had a fiduciary responsibility to microsoft as the ceo of the for-profit company of which microsoft had a stake but legally speaking according to the charter the board is only responsible for not killing everyone right and sam sam is on the was on the board too but yeah right right all right that is that is true that is true so all of a sudden satya makes this statement at like three in the morning that's like we at microsoft still hold steadfast in our mission and are committed to open ai as a strategic. We're excited to get to know the interim CEO who they randomly promoted from a role underneath Sam at the time.

And everything's fine, and everything's going steadfast, and we're all cool. Was this like a weekend tweet to save the markets? Yes. It was like, I have to put this out before the markets open on Monday because otherwise our stock is going to just totally die.

Yeah. But then three senior executives also resigned in response to the news and slowly at OpenAI. And slowly people just started trickling out of the company. As far as the timeline is concerned, when is this all happening? Friday night, baby. This is still Friday night. And when you say slowly trickling, you mean very, very quickly? Very, very quickly trickling out of the company.

As far as, yeah, real time. It was happening in real time on Twitter. It was insane. Yeah. Insane. Okay. So I finally go to bed. Nice.

And now we're on to Saturday morning, November 18th. Now we're on to Saturday morning, November 18th. OpenAI sends an internal memo about how internal leadership is scrambling to figure out what happened. And they're still having multiple conversations with the board trying to understand what's going on. Because the rest of the board, the remaining four people on the board, were not being consistently candid in their conversations with the rest of the company. Right. being consistently candid in their conversations with the rest of the company right um and as a recording right now we still actually don't know why they fired sam and greg yeah like it makes it makes no sense hopefully by the time this podcast goes live on friday we'll know what happened but but who knows um but the memo that they sent said we can definitively say that the

board's decision was not made in response to maleficence is that how you pronounce that word maleficence yeah okay yeah is that yes i think so oh well okay that word maleficence maleficence or anything related to financial business safety or security slash privacy practices so it looks like sam didn't like break any major laws or do anything super illegal or i don't know destroy the company financially or anything like that sure uh after this sam started telling people that he was already planning a new venture because he tweeted out like well i'm confused but excited for what's next get ready to see what's next. Get ready to see what's next. And then Greg Brockman was like, bigger things coming soon.

So within like 12 hours, they already seemed to have a plan with what they wanted to do with the next thing. Don't look back, Sam. Yeah, which... Just kidding. Which is crazy. Now, there have been reports

that Sam has been apparently fielding investments for a new AI chip startup that could be competing with NVIDIA and reduce reliance on them. And there is a theory that he had been using OpenAI's name to sort of get the funding for that, even though it was his personal startup. That is just a lot of rumors and reporting, but that's a potential theory, right? After this, investors started exerting pressure on open ai to reinstate sam because obviously people were leaving they were just about to get a 90 billion

dollar valuation and anyone could just pull out at any time microsoft's investment in open ai isn't like they didn't give them all the money they just gave them credits and they could cancel the credits and say that they didn't like fulfill their obligations or whatever. Right. So you could take this company from worth 90 billion dollars to worth like almost nothing in a weekend. And they didn't want to do that to the board. Investors start going to open AI and they're like, board, you have to reinstate Sam. Like, this is a huge problem. The board ended up agreeing to reinstate him in principle.

I'm not really sure what that means. Uh, but they couldn't come to a decision in the timeline that they were given. They missed multiple deadlines on it. Um, and Sam said that he was ambivalent on coming back and would need significant governance changes if he were to come back. That's Saturday. Okay. Okay.

Sunday. I wake up. I get out. Sunday. I wake up. I get out of bed. I brush my teeth. I open my phone. Oh my god! What do you find? Sam goes to meet the board at OpenAI HQ, where he posts a photo of him with a guest badge,

saying it's the first and last time he will ever wear one of them. I did see that. He is theoretically going in order to negotiate with them on becoming CEO again, getting rid of the current board and working on getting a new board in because again, they had theoretically agreed to replace themselves. Yeah. I remember this unfolding on my timeline because I was still reading all of the reactions of what a crazy day in tech that sam altman is getting

fired from open ai this might be the craziest day oh he's he might be going back okay it's also an even crazier day now like all that happened yeah yeah like oh is this going to be a nothing burger uh and then he goes back and he's trying to work with them to both find a new, to basically find new board members. And what was funny about this is that Mira Muerta, who was the interim CEO that they elevated to CEO after they fired him, she was the one that was trying to work with them to get him rehired. He set this noon deadline for them to figure figure it out they asked him if they could extend to 5 p.m he said okay and in the period in that five hour period of time where he asked if they could extend till 5 p.m they fired mira and hired a new interim ceo what which to me just says that they are like telling him one thing and like trying to like shove something in at the last minute.

Wow. Yeah, which is not great. And they hired as the new interim CEO Emmett Shearer, who is the co-founder of Twitch for some reason. Straight off the streets. Yeah. Like, you, do you want to be the CEO? Come on, get over here. Kinda.

I mean, apparently they went to a bunch of like two different AI companies and asked them. In five, in five hours, zoom calls, like, Hey, can I get on a call real quick? You want a job? You want to be the CEO of open AI, your biggest competitor. Both of those people said no. And apparently Emmett Shear almost said no, but then said yes, which is kind of ironic because he's tweeted some very weird stuff recently. Like he said that he thinks the CEO job could easily get automated away except for a few key decisions which is maybe why he joined interesting yeah okay um meanwhile pretty much every single employee at open ai started retweeting sam's tweets with heart emojis which to me signals that they are basically saying like if you go start

your own new company we're gonna come with you okay yeah it was almost every single employee so there was just heart emojis so they seem to like sam being the ceo people seem to like sam being the ceo yeah yeah so that was the end of sunday okay monday i wake up i brush my teeth i open my phone 3 a.m it's announced that sam greg and others will be joining microsoft uh to lead a new advanced ai research division this is all before the markets even open on monday yeah cool this all happened in like 48 hours yeah jeez so and then satya effectively says any other open ai employees that want to go to microsoft can come to which is hilarious there were microsoft employees that were tweeting like these memes out being like i thought we didn't have head count and And now 770 employees are going to come to Microsoft?

This is also really funny, just in the context of, you probably can't acquire OpenAI. But if they all leave at once and you hire all of them, technically you didn't acquire them. You didn't acquire them. But that's pretty good for Microsoft. That would be, yeah, it would be insane for Microsoft. They get the company for free.

They already have all the Azure servers. already been already been working with them so closely that would probably be pretty easy for them to get back to normal right which seems great except it's not great that microsoft already a giant tech juggernaut would now just own effectively the biggest like an amoeba in the. Absorbs a whole bunch of people. I got Activision Blizzard. Now I'm going for OpenAI. Now I'm coming for you. It was a whole situation. Very crazy.

Yeah, like we said, OpenAI was about to be valued at $87 billion and Microsoft just effectively got them for free. Which is insane. That would be the biggest deal ever. Satya, you dog.

Satya, you dog. Yeah, and after Satya said this, the stock price went to the moon. So at first it dipped when Sam said he got fired, and then Satya was like, we hired Sam, and it was like, whoo. Wow. Yeah, Sam Allman moves markets. $87 billion. But then a little bit later on Monday,

Ilya, the board member that kind of fired Sam, tweeted out that he deeply regretted his participation in the board's actions, and he's doing everything that he can to reunite the company, which is crazy, because a lot of people were speculating that he was the one that convinced the board to fire sam in the first place considering jeffrey hinton his like you know person that he trained under was the one that is the most worried about evil ai taking over and the biggest theory going around is that ilia was so concerned about the acceleration through corporate means that he

didn't feel like the non-profit part of open, which was supposed to be the main part of the company, had any governance anymore. And they just needed to replace him with someone who would slow down. So it's insane that he's saying that he regrets everything. Like, I regret everything. Yeah. Come back, Sam. Yeah. So people don't hate me as much.

Exactly. Yeah. So people don't hate me as much. Exactly. Yeah. So then in the morning on Monday, this letter comes out with 505 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees saying that they will resign if Sam and Greg are not reinstated and the board is ousted. By 5 p.m., that number was up to 738 employees out of the 770. Over 98%. And I would guess that the like 30 employees were probably just on vacation that'd be my guess because if you're one of the few

people that was like nah i'm staying on this that's crazy when it's 769 out of 70 and you're the last guy like oh it's me yeah oh you're dancing on the titanic that's wild yeah um but plot twist for the hbo drama that's about to come out in a couple of years from this. Ilya's name was also on this letter. Okay, that's just confusing. That's just confusing. So, guy who fired Sam says, we demand Sam back? Yeah.

Okay. All right. We both demand Sam back and we demand that i am fired and replaced we yeah so that's that's really committing to the i regret this yeah really committing hardcore committing to that wow but like you know isn't sam a microsoft employee now like didn't satya just say that he was gonna hire sam like about this statement and now everyone's saying come back and then last night monday night satya went on multiple interviews on like cnbc and on caris fisher's on podcast

and they're all like like isn't sam a microsoft employee now and satya is just like whatever sam wants to do he could do it's totally up to him if he wants to come join us i'm cool with that if he wants to go back to open ai I'm cool with that. If he wants to go back to OpenAI, I'm cool with that. I'll support him no matter what. That sounds like we sent him something he hasn't signed yet, so I can't say he's an employee yet. But come on, Sam. Yeah, he's fielding his options clearly.

For sure. But it's just insane that the CEO of Microsoft put out statements being like, they now work for us. We are starting a new experimental AI division. And that was just kind of a i don't know maybe maybe it was literally just to save the stock he's trying to secure the yeah secure the stock without having actually secured anything yet yeah now we're down to reports where sam is apparently trying to go back to the go back Today, Tuesday, as of this morning,

they were apparently back in negotiations trying to get him back there. And the Twitch CEO, who became the intern CEO, the old Twitch CEO, became the intern CEO of OpenAI, is now saying he's going to resign if the board doesn't tell him what happened

and why they fired Sam, which they didn't even tell him. They didn't even tell Sam. No. Like I would hope that by now he knows, but he, I just, it doesn't make any sense.

So as of 4 27 PM Eastern time, Tuesday, November 21st. Yeah. Check Twitter real quick. Let me just check Twitter. Yeah, you're probably right.

I think that's it. Make sure nothing has been posted. We are up to date. Okay. Nothing has been posted check Twitter. Real quick, let me just check Twitter. Yeah, you're probably right. I think that's it. Make sure nothing has been posted. We are up to date. Okay, nothing has been posted so far. So far, that's where we're at. There were reports that they were trying to get Anthropic to merge with them to take over the board. And Anthropic is one of OpenAI's biggest competitors.

They make an AI called Claude, which is supposed to be a much more friendly, much more aligned AI, and they have all these guidelines and rules. It's a whole thing. There are two potential outcomes that happen. Either Sam comes back as CEO, the board gets completely replaced,

and we are looking at a very, very different OpenAI, even with the nonprofit board, that probably doesn't care as much about making sure that AI doesn't take over humanity. So that's where we're at currently. So either Sam goes back and we have a very different company or he doesn't go back and the entirety of OpenAI goes to Microsoft and the actual OpenAI turns into a pile of dust. and the actual open AI turns into a pile of dust. Okay. If you had to make a prediction,

which is such a silly thing to do because you're going to know before this even goes live, but what would you quickly think is actually going to happen? I think that the board is going to cave because each individual member of the board, like their reputation is on the line there's three of them that are making this decision because ilia caved and the entire company seems to disagree with the board the entire company disagrees with them and i don't think those three people are ever going to have a job anywhere ever again yeah if they allow that to happen um however that

apparently their original like idea of open ai was that they want the company to be able to fail in the event that they disagree with the direction it's going in because they want so badly for this AGI model to not take over the world and destroy humanity or whatever that they're willing to like put the company up and smoke and they have so far resisted so much that it's also an equal possibility that that just doesn't happen and then microsoft becomes like three times more powerful i think that he will go back to open ai personally and this will all be kind of a nothing burger except for the fact that the company is completely restructured and it's much more of a for-profit company. Yeah, what would your prediction be? I feel like I agree.

Just having that overwhelming, whatever, 700 plus out of 770 all seemed to send a pretty quick, obvious message that, hey, we preferred the way it was when Sam was writing it. Then it seems like they've made it very clear that that's what they want to do. So I don't know. It is weird.

It's a developing story. Yeah. That was our summary up until this point. So at least as you now read further headlines, you know of this history. Yeah. You know where we history yeah you know where we follow it you know where we were in the moment on tuesday yeah um fascinating stuff these conversations that with him returning to the company were supposed to happen today tuesday

pacific time so three hours before currently right now so this could change within the next few hours perfect but uh and maybe we'll be able to add a little snippet in tomorrow if it's changed by then. But, but yeah, it's been very insane to watch happen in real time.

Well, look at that. It's less than 24 hours later. Real quick, we said we'd be back if something happened. It's the next day. Something happened.

Something happened. So, real quick, just a quick add-on to actually get to the the point where we're gonna just ship this episode what happened since yesterday okay so yesterday we were speculating uh whether or not sam was going to be reinstated whether or not there's going to be a new board as of like 1 a.m eastern time last night uh sam is back we predicted correctly open it yes yes we

did there is a new board we predicted correctly yeah uh open i yes, yes, we did. There is a new board. We predicted correctly. Yeah. OpenAI put out a statement that said, we have reached an agreement in principle, yet again in principle, whatever that means. I think that just means we haven't signed anything yet, but somebody said it on the phone, so we're counting it. Yeah. For Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board

of Brett Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much and your patience through this. Yeah, okay. So just to set the stage a little, Brett Taylor is the former CTO of Facebook, and he was a chairman of Twitter before the Musk acquisition. You mean Meta and X? Yes.

Oh my God. Yeah. meta and x yes oh my god yeah uh he was also the co-ceo of salesforce until january of this year aka slack um yeah larry summers is an economist and was the former treasury secretary for some reason i'm not sure why he's on this board very strange anyway um the initial point of the board is going to grow it to grow it to nine people so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. Microsoft wants to have a seat on the board, and Sam also wants to be on the board, but they're not on the initial board. And Satya says he doesn't want any more surprises. Good statement.

I would be very terrified of Satya just showing up at night night and i don't want any more surprise i don't want any more surprises now do we yeah um okay i still have a couple questions from this though right first of all what happens to ilia because he was on the board he got kicked off the board but he also flipped to support sam is he still at the company he signed that paper with the other 700 employees unsure i keep doing research on this and i can't find anything okay so maybe stuff will come out in the next uh that's still in the air as of recording yes yeah um but obviously the biggest question is what actually happened here right and there actually has been some reporting that gives some insight into what people think actually happened here, right? And there actually has been some reporting that gives some insight into what people think actually happened.

There's this report from the New York Times that says that Sam and the board have been fighting for more than a year now, but it got a lot worse after ChatGPT launched and everything got more commercialized. Apparently, Helen Toner, which if you remember from earlier, was that Georgetown University person on the board.

She co-wrote a paper for Georgetown that was very critical of OpenAI's approach to safety and praised Anthropic's approach to safety. Sam reprimanded Helen for this paper, according to some emails that the Times got a hold of. And he said, I do not feel we're on the same page on the damage of this paper any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight he also apparently talked to a number of other higher-ups about potentially getting her removed from the board and ilia was apparently thinking about also wanting to remove her from the board and then i guess since then they all were like nah sam needs to get removed from a board so there was already some friction yeah so there also used to be three more members of the board but those positions never got filled um it just seems like a lot of

small things that kind of led to a crazy weekend got it okay yeah well now we know now we know now we know what we know we don't know what we don't know but we know what we know so if you don't if you didn't know now you know but if you if we if we don't know then you also don't know so that's true unless you went on the internet yeah okay that's the end of the interjection hopefully hopefully uh yeah this that's up until 3 10 p.m wednesday november 21st if things changed i'm sorry ship it all right believe it or not it's not the only thing that happened this week there are some other things that we're still going to talk about right after the break so let's do trivia do a leap of interviewed tim cook she did she did they talked about vision pro she seemed very impressed for

some reason i know you were hoping to know what do a leap of thought of vision pro so she got to try it no oh oh no really they just talked about it? That's dumb. What? Really? Wow. All right. Trivia. Also, more news that's broken while we're recording this podcast, even. Binance's CZ is pleading guilty. Doesn't really deserve a full news section, because if you didn't see that coming um i don't know

what sort of news you're paying attention to but now trivia so continuing with our sam altman trivia this week oh no there you go while building his first app looped sam altman reportedly worked so hard that he got what old-timey disease? Oh, I know this. That's crazy. A. You know this? Gangrene.

B. Scurvy. C. Consumption. Or D. Typhus. Okay. I have a guess.

Okay. Why do you know that? I must have recently read this i guess or yeah all right weird we'll figure it out after the break you will the all-new fan duel sportsbook and casino is bringing you more action than ever We'll see you next time. Call off quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite.

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and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. Alright, we're back. Jumping into the final section, we've got a couple quick hits

that somehow weren't the biggest news of the past six to seven days. Just sort of got swept under the rug, but still kind of interesting. Might have been headliners in their own weeks, but an interesting one for me was the polestar 2 quietly got a range bump for the 2024 model with a 655 kilometer range that's over 400 miles of range 406 407 uh didn't seem to make that many headlines that's pretty i know pretty good 400 miles of range i remember you posting the tweet about it from Polestar and I looked it up to try to

find articles and there were only like two articles about it. Just a few. It was like a kind of a quiet news week. So I kind of figured it would be more like. Isn't that fairly major? Because don't not that many EVs have over 400 miles of range. It's a really good point. I think I can only name EQS, Lucid Air.

I don't think the Rivian with the MaxPak The long range Model S Long range Model S It does claim over 400 And then now Polestar 2 What does the EQS have? I think it has an EQS that just has around 415 Or something like that Lucid's way over 400

Really? The Gravity that we just saw Is announced it's supposed to ship with 440 miles of range on their SUV. Dang. Except if you have too many kids in the back seat. I'm sure if you load it up, it's not going to go 440 miles, but

you know, it's cool to see. I think Rivian might have an honest 400 when they ship theirs. With the range pack? With the max pack. Yeah, the big boy. Yeah, the Polestar. add that to the list. 400 plus mile range. That's awesome. I feel like that's a pretty good number too that you want to hit.

They're achieving this with a bunch of small things that sort of add up to like a 10% boost in range, like a slightly larger battery. It goes from 78 to 82 kilowatt hours. It's a little bit of a refresh, so it's a little more aerodynamic. It's got the nose cone now. So you add that stuff together and you end up with a more efficient drivetrain hidden this is not yet the one that's using the nacs charger right uh that happens in 2025 i think this well that's unclear the clue doesn't tell me too much okay it just says the polestar 2 the upgraded polestar 2 will have a

barrier breaking super long range ironically the photos they tweeted only show from the right side and the back but not where the charge port is yeah no info on that interesting okay i mean that's what i'm most interested in is i don't really want to get an ev until everything starts moving over to nacs anyway yeah that's that is a really good point i feel like in the age of recommending EVs when you're really thinking about buying a car, if you don't need one right now, if you're thinking about getting an EV, I would strongly suggest if you can wait one more year. Yeah. Every single EV that is going to get better. They're all going to have the Tesla charge port. Almost all of them now

have made that promise. Yeah. They're going to to support necs and they'll have way more chargers available to them as far as road tripping goes anyway if you're never going to road trip fine i guess it doesn't matter but that is a hashtag pro tip if you were thinking about getting an electric car anytime soon yeah pretty worth having yeah uh and then one more bit is uh we did get to the go to the f1 race this was sort of in the background of all of this. Me and a slice of the team, we went out to Las Vegas for one of the races near the end of the Formula 1 season. Did you get to see the sphere? We did get to see the sphere.

I know. It's just as exciting as the race. It is quite a large spherical building with screens on the outside. It's pretty sick. quite a large spherical building with screens on the outside. It's pretty sick. I, first thing I noticed when I looked at it and, uh,

Ellis can verify. I was like, I think that's 90 Hertz. Really? I think it's 90 Hertz. Wow. But it's hard to say like, what is a 90 Hertz thing at that scale?

Like it's a huge, it's an led wall basically like stitched together. Like I think animations moving across the sphere looked very smooth. Like there were 90 Hertz, but I don't know if they're refreshing at 90 hertz. We only want one thing, and it's disgusting to see the LA sphere. It is Vegas. Vegas.

It is super interesting to see. But yeah, the F1 race was like a street race. So part of the track was the Las Vegas strip. It was a very picturesque race. It was at night too. Yeah. was the Las Vegas strip. Yeah.

It was a very picturesque race. It was at night too. Yeah. But the one thing that's going to stick with me is just how much louder and more like visceral it is in person than a broadcast. I was thinking that because I saw all your Instagram stories

and you were just like, this is so insane. It's much more insane than through your phone. And I was watching through my phone and I was like, that doesn't seem that crazy. Yeah, dude. This is my pet peeve with with car videos online is none of them can actually give you the feeling of what the car sounds and feels like yeah i've seen

a lot of really good videos of like micing up the the car and it it just peaks every time you can't actually feel the vibrations the different the difference between like the sub bass like the super low rumbles versus like the sound of the pitch when you accelerate like none of that comes through on video the bass that is your chest cavity yeah yeah the uh the loudest video i've ever taken in my life is when all of those cars lined up for the beginning of the race 20 cars in a row all at once light turns green they all go i think it probably hit 115 decibels or something like that on my watch and it on my phone it just sounds like it just sounds like a normal like f1 car passing by it doesn't sound that crazy it was

chest rattling loud so did you have to wear ear uh earplugs i should have air plugs i should have look what apple's done to my vernacular i could have worn airpods pro maybe and like had the pro that's through on or whatever yeah um no they gave us earplugs i didn't wear them i wanted to experience it yeah with all of my all of my being yeah uh i would have regretted it no it was awesome are you a fan now i honestly yeah the thing about going to a an f1 race in person is like this is a four mile track or whatever it is and you can't see most of the track most of the time you only get to post up at like one turn right or one straight away yeah so what's happening was we were on this balcony and i was looking out at the straightaway which

was right between the last turn and turn one. But then anytime something interesting happened, you'd hear like a crowd reaction or a gasp, and I would turn around and look at the TV broadcast to find out what was happening, because that's what everyone else was seeing. And you'd turn back around. And I'd turn back and I'd see, and I'd turn back around and I'd see what was happening on the screen.

So it was one of those. How long is one lap? Literally 90 seconds. Whoa. Do you know how far, how many miles that is? So they're going, the entire race is 50 laps, 190 miles. That's, whoa. Okay.

And it's 90 minutes long. Wow. 3.8 miles per lap. 3.8 miles per lap, 90 seconds. Wow. They are cruising. So when I first got there there we posted up at that like straight away where they came around the bend and did turn one and i was looking at the

guys i was like how fast do you think they're going down there we were like maybe 110 i think they might be going 90 but maybe 100 miles an hour around this turn think about that 100 to 110 miles an hour around the curve no and then, and then we turned around and looked at the broadcast and they have like the cameras on the cars and the live speed readouts. Yeah. And they were going 175 miles an hour around the turn. The first turn. They're cruising.

They're going so fast that you see the cars moving and you think, wow, I always thought an F1 car was so much bigger than that that looks like a little itty bitty tiny car and then you see them stationary and you're like wow this is the biggest car i've ever seen this is like an suv sized vehicle dang like it fine it warps it with every single one of your senses i've never thought about them being big and the smell oh my god i love the smell the race fuel the fuel the tires there's just chemical in the air i love hot chemical i love those hot tires everything dang yeah it is a much more every

sense you have from the vibration to the smell to the to the visuals to the you can see the tires getting torn up in real time like as they go one set of tires last 20 laps and then they're like done oh my god torn up it's very it's really interesting i know a lot of people that were criticizing it for being in vegas saying it was just like a lot of spectacle and stuff but when i think about when i was like a wee lad playing playstation 2 playing gran turismo 5 and a lot of the maps were like in vegas on the las vegas strip strip and i was like yeah that would never be a real track and the fact that they the photos that i saw from it were just like there's the bellagio and like all of the big hotels the sphere in the background yeah which sometimes had a little emoji

face on it like watching the race as it went by and then after the race just to put the nail in the spectacle coffin it was like fire like there was a coordinated fireworks show launched from the roof of every hotel in vegas it was literally like a city-wide panoramic fireworks show from like all these it was vegas is like another universe yeah vegas at night too it's like 11 12 midnight it was it was very picturesque wow it was super cool that's crazy so it was a pleasure to experience it we were also working the whole time putting together a video about f1 i'm gonna sort of it'll probably be live around this episode but f1 explained is is i am very excited about this video i'm afraid to learn about f1 because after drive

to survive came out it felt like every single person in my life it's sort of like soccer or football as i i'm gonna yell that in the comments but oh yeah it's like it's like whenever the world cup happens everyone who i thought just did not care about soccer suddenly is like knows every little thing about soccer and it felt the same way after drive to survive came out it's like everyone watched that documentary and now everyone that i know cannot stop talking about f1 there is definitely an element of that the world coming together for a cultural event my favorite part outside of that is how much what happens in f1 affects what happens outside of f1. So there's the obvious part,

which is like, these are a bunch of engineers developing like the tiniest fraction of a second improvements on these cars and spending millions of dollars to figure out what works. That stuff will eventually trickle down to the cars you and I get to drive, which is super cool. Even if it's just like a simple thing,

like materials. It's like a research division. Exactly. And literally is like ferrari's out there racing cars around the track and then they figure out all the improvements over time to f1 have been one team sometimes one guy on one team goes i think if we put a wing on the front axle it would give us more downforce and that could let us turn faster and they'll do that on say that they'll do that on their car and they'll roll out their car and one of the cars will be mysteriously faster for some reason before all the other teams figure out what's going on and do their own version of it and that literally happens every year with some innovation on the car

dang okay wait i have a dumb question potentially go over it is that why all the f1 cars kind of look the same yes because they've all like kind of fell on this one form factor that just works yeah it's a good observation if you yeah so if you scroll back far enough they all kind of look like simple tubes with wheels and as you fast forward over time, you kind of watch them all morph to get flatter and more blade shaped. And then they start to add the same features.

But if you're observant enough, you can find archival footage where one of the cars has a front wing and none of the rest do. And then the next season, all of them have front wings. And then one of the cars has this arrow feature. And then the next season, because it worked really well, well all the rest do my favorite is when stuff doesn't work

so in 2001 there was a verstappen car that had a huge front wing sticking off of the front which was like a stupid looking spoiler over the front axle and they rolled it out for a race and it just didn't work that great and we never saw it again dang oh my god why did they think that that would work because downforce on the front axle keeps the front tires planted better around turns yeah i know nothing about cars yeah it's a lot of physics i could see why they probably thought that would work so the idea would be like yeah if we think of something that looks so dumb sometimes it's inside the car huh and it's so secretive too it's like when apple does something secretive it's because they don't want anyone else to copy them

when these cars companies these teams do something secretive it's secretive until the moment it rolls out onto the track and then if anyone sees it it's out wow there was a mclaren car that had a third brake pedal inside the car and nobody knew what was going on until a photographer saw that on one side of the car during a corner their brakes were hot and they were like glowing and they were like that's kind of weird because the car is supposed to be accelerating out of this corner but the brakes are still hot what is going on what it's because this was a track that mostly turned left and so they added a brake pedal in the m McLaren that would break just the left side tires while they were turning. So you could accelerate a little while still braking the inside wheels, which let you turn faster.

It was insane. And no one could tell how they did it until they, someone, oh, I forgot the story, but someone figured out like there was a McLaren car got left out after a race. And some guy took a picture of the inside of it and saw an extra pedal and was like, Oh no, you're making me interested in this. So, so like you can do whatever you want to your car. Basically there are rules,

but yeah, within the rules you must. Yeah. Dang. So it's more of an engineering competition. It is exactly what that is. Yeah. God dang it.

I'm trying so hard to avoid this. So welcome to the cult, my friend. The last race is in Abu Dhabi this weekend. I'm sure you'll be watching along with the rest of us. Yeah, but the Vegas race was very cool in person. Cool. And that was like one of two races that happens in the U.S.? Yeah, like two or three.

I think Austin and Miami. Okay. And I think this is the last one this year. Wow. Crazy. Cool. All right. Well, it's fascinating stuff. Hopefully that video goes out around this Miami. Okay. And I think this is the last one this year. Wow. Crazy. Cool. All right. Well,

it's fascinating stuff. Hopefully that video goes out around this time. Yep. Watch it if you haven't already. Otherwise, uh, we know that Dua Lipa tried the vision pro. Wait,

did she? I don't think so. I don't know. Sorry. She interviewed Tim Cook. She interviewed Tim Cook. They talked about, she might've,

I bet you she tried it. There's no way that Tim Cook came and was like, what an incredible thing we've made, and then didn't let Dua Lipa try it. Wouldn't that be insane? No. I disagree. That would be the most Tim Cook thing ever.

Yeah, that's 100% something he would do. Yeah. Just be like, I will be in your podcast to talk about it. Really? You can't try it. But they let me try it. I'm sure she could try it if she wanted to yeah i'm sure they would get her a briefing my thing is like if tim cook were to come on this

podcast and he flies to new jersey and he he sits down in these chairs you think he's bringing a vision pro with him to let us try it no he would flex on us he'd be like i've been using vision pro for about a year now and we'd be like yeah i know we know you know i've never shown a photo of me wearing it ever yeah you'll never see me wearing it yeah for sure interesting okay well that was the totally nothing going on week in technology this week thanks for tuning in thanks for tuning in hopefully for the love of the sake of my eyeballs and my attention span please do not do this again on thursday night or friday night or we'll have to do trivia we we yes yeah i'm trying to keep you guys up to date with what's going on in technology and when you do things on thursdays and fridays we can't it's tough so

all right we did our best let's get our trivia out of here trivia time trivia i'm writing both my answers i'm writing them both quick update on the scores okay trivia out of here. Trivia time. Trivia. I'm writing both my answers. I'm writing them both. Quick update on the scores. Marquez with 13. Andrew with 12. David with one. This is so dope.

Carry the wine. 12. Look, I knew what my job was before this. I also knew what like a camera stood for. Okay. Question one. One year before OpenAI was launched in 2015, for a total of eight days, Sam Altman was the CEO

of what popular social media company? Marquez already has his answers written. You already wrote it? Pencil down. There's only two possible answers. There's only two possible answers. There's many social media companies.

But that have had leadership changes for eight days. What's your guess? I'm curious. Flip them and read, boys. You're correct. It's Reddit. It is Reddit. Both of you got it. The only other option was Twitter and that was not that long ago.

Dang. Dang. I was hoping I'd slide ahead on this one. He also instated Steve Huffman after him. He did. Which was another fun fact. Yeah. All right.

Continuing the Sam Altman party bus, train, caboose, airplane. While building his first apt. Yeah, F1 car. While building his first app. F1 car. Honestly. Yeah. Kind of. While building his first app, Sam Altman reportedly worked so hard

he got what old timey disease? timey disease. Marquez has already written his answer. He just put the pen down. Yeah, I did. Wait, I forgot. Sorry, I forgot I made multiple choice for this one. You did, you did.

Do you need it? It's- A, gangrene. Okay. B, scurvy. C, consumption. Or D, typhus. What is consumption?

Consumption is an old-timey word for tuberculosis. It's like what they used to call tuberculosis. Yeah. Scurvy. Scurvy. Both correct. Sam Altman suffered from scurvy. When you asked that question, for some reason, I just knew it, but I don't remember reading it.

That's exactly how I felt. Really? I don't know where I learned that. Wow, in the depths of my brain. Why do we both know that? Did you just, like, whisper it to us one time? He only didn't whisper it. I had scurvy once.

When was the last time you guys used ChatGPT? Today. I put Marquez's F1 script in ChatGPT, and I asked if it was accurate. Damn. What did it say? It just said, like said like here i can read you what it said actually yeah it's hilarious yeah i was gonna say that that's how he implanted somehow this knowledge into your brains but the story is i actually asked it for an f1 script and

that's what it spit out so it should be good okay yeah i said is this is there anything incorrect in this script and then i just posted marquez's entire script and it said the script you provided appears to be a detailed and enthusiastic introduction to formula one likely intended for a video format it covers a wide range of topics including the sports history technical aspects rules and personal experiences with the sport wow without specific content on the accuracy requirements or the intended audience here are some general observations one it is very comprehensive the script does an excellent job of covering various aspects including this technical side the history rules etc

i like this sponsorship integration the mention of is smoothly integrated linking the linking their specific industry standard focus to f1's emphasis on safety and technology. This kind of integration is effective for sponsored content. Personal narration style. The script is written in a personal and relatable style, which is engaging for viewers. It narrates personal experiences, opinions, and makes it more engaging than a straightforward factual presentation. This is wild. I know.

Catchy PT. It didn't answer your question at all. No. But it's very nice to me. It has eight of these pillars, and then at the end it says, In summary, the script is well-constructed for an informative and engaging video on Formula One, especially for viewers who have a basic understanding of the sport

and are interested in learning more. The integration of personal experiences and the explanation of technical aspects are particularly strong points. I'll take it. I don't think any of us in the studio could have given Marquez a better compliment. Yeah. He's blushing right now. I'm blushing over here.

It also says that you had very good engagement and pacing. It said accuracy without cross-referencing every fact. The script seems very accurate. Okay, good. Okay, perfect. You know what? Let accurate. Okay, good. Okay, perfect. You know what? Let's end it at that. That's perfect.

That's all I need to hear. ChatGPT has officially endorsed this video, so go ahead and watch it when it comes out. Hopefully it's out soon. Hopefully it's not hallucinating. Yeah, hopefully it's totally right. Yeah. And, uh...

Oh, that's an F1 car. Anyway, that'll be it for now. That'll be it. Hopefully no other news comes out. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one watching catch you in the next one bye Did Dua Lipa get to try the Vision Pro? No.

What happened with the SpaceX rocket? It exploded. It exploded. How many miles of range does the Polestar 2 have? 407! It's 406.96. So, seven. How many percent less energy does it consume?

15. Nine. Anyway, okay. I was thinking of that Cholula. I thought that was you. I thought you were going to ask. What percent? What percent am I down?

Cholula. 15.